RBX Escape the Monsters

The brief

A learning project — and a game built for my child.

I wanted to put my coding hands on a fundamentally different stack from my day-to-day, and Roblox Studio’s Lua + game-runtime combination was the perfect excuse. The brief I set myself: ship a multiplayer Roblox experience that’s actually fun, with proper game systems (quests, inventory, day/night, crafting, item spawning) rather than just toy scripts.

What I built

A small open-world quest game. There’s a central safe zone with five player bases, and seven colour-coded outer tiers ranged progressively further away. The core loop is:

1. Chop trees in the safe zone for wood.
2. Talk to the shopkeeper NPC, who hands out a random fetch quest with funny dialogue (“Mate, I left my coffee in the blue zone this morning…”).
3. Head out to the named colour zone, find the spawned item, bring it back.
4. Get paid in coins, spend them on permanent speed upgrades.
5. Faster speed unlocks farther zones, which unlock harder quests for bigger payouts.

At night, monsters roam the colour zones — you need to retreat to the safe zone or lose the quest item you’re carrying.

Major systems

• Day/night cycle — drives the night-monster spawn and pacing across the loop.
• Quest system — a Quests.lua data module and a QuestGiver ProximityPrompt on the shopkeeper, with per-player quest state held server-side and quest items spawned on demand in the matching colour zone.
• Inventory & coins — folder-and-StringValue-based inventory, a GUI panel, and a persistent coin balance that drives the speed-tier upgrades.
• Item spawning — quest items appear dynamically in the right zone; ambient chickens and coin pickups round out the world.
• Crafting — recipe module, server-side crafting logic, and a client GUI; wood from the safe-zone trees feeds furniture and decor crafting for player bases.
• Plot assignment — five bases assigned per session, each with its own sliding-door entrance.

What I’m learning

• Lua and Roblox’s ReplicatedStorage / ServerStorage / ServerScriptService separation, and the discipline that comes with it.
• Server-authoritative state with RemoteEvents for client UI updates.
• Designing a game loop with actual progression rather than one-shot mechanics — the speed-tier-gates-quest-zones pivot was the thing that made it fun, not the original survival concept.